Born in modest circumstances at the dawn of the century, Vittorio De Sica grew up in Naples. Famous in the 1920s, it is a kind of Jean-Pierre Aumont Alpine, comfortable in a lighter register, capable of depth at times when Max Ophuls ( Madame de ...) or Roberto Rossellini (General Della Rovere ) are behind the camera. As director, De Sica is a rare artist whose humanistic sensibility goes hand in hand with a cruel lucidity. "The war experience was crucial for us all. Everyone felt the mad desire to throw all the old stories Italian cinema, to plant the camera in the middle of real life, amidst all that filled our eyes aghast "
," he wrote in 1960
, looking back on his participation in neo-realist movement (quoted by
At the same time, the editor Mario Serandrei employs for the first time the word "neo-realism" to describe Obsession of Luchino Visconti. Roberto Rossellini about to reveal crudely violence Rome, Open City. De Sica
part of this quest for truth. He designed a film stripped of its most conspicuous artifice (sets, professional actors), a cinema of the street. This does not mean an abandonment of fiction.
The filmmaker always telling stories, and even fables. He meets and international success: the Grand Prix and International Critics Prize at Cannes in 1951 for his utopian Miracle in Milan, and a few Oscars, including the painful Sciuscia for The Bicycle Thief or The Garden of the Finzi-Contini . If the power reproach gladly give him an image of Italy too black, he enjoys the unwavering love of the public.
Pursued by censorship, it should abandon a project on child prostitution in Naples, and turned to less controversial subjects, magnifying the beauty of Sophia Loren ( Two Women ) and Jennifer Jones ( Stazione Termini). One of his last films, The Garden of Finzi-Contini
, Based on the novel by
Bassani, turned four years before his death in Paris
" wrote in 1952 that Vittorio De Sica and co-screenwriter Cesare Zavattini
had put many months writing a story to finish by making believe he did not exist.
man looking for his bike is not just a worker, a man who loves his son, who desperately tries to steal another machine, which ultimately represents the plight of the proletariat is reduced to stealing his tools.
It is all that and a host of other things, infinitely analysable, precisely because, first, it is, and not in isolation but with a whole block of reality around him, and in this block traces of the presence of the world: friends, church, seminarians German Rita Hayworth poster on his, and all this is not just a decoration, but "there is" almost on the same plane.
Do we not much art to organize a story, set up a staging, directing actors, finally giving the impression that There is no narrative or staging, or actors? In other words, we are dealing here again with a second realism, and the synthesis of documentary realism.
With it recognizes that the ideal of the former can not be achieved without a detour, but this one is not believed that This detour should consist of a stylization of the event. The perfect aesthetic illusion of reality can result only from a prodigious means ascetic, where there is ultimately more art than in any expressionism or constructivism.
Ascèse first scenario. It's not just a well constructed script, by impeccable logic dramatic, with counterpoint subtle psychological. This architecture is not that this is history. If the artist in any field deserves to be called divine creator is fine here. So why is it almost never alone.
teams are famous Italian writers. We wanted to see there concern that advertising, but there are deeper, the feeling of the infinite wealth of being a man alone could never achieve evoke.
Zavattini and De Sica worked for months scenario Bicycle Thief to eventually believe that there was none.
asceticism This scenario is completed by an asceticism of the staging and asceticism actors who still require supplements to such devices that Filming in the outdoors the introduction of a camera and its manipulation involve no apparent disturbance, or for the worker and his son does not take over a role that their bikes.
In the phenomenological realism, art arises in the very act by which he seeks to destroy. But this, he is perfectly conscious, and in fact the very charter of his aesthetic legitimacy. At the same time as its definition, if one adds that with him everything is turned to produce a density of being, that is, in a word older than
Réalisation : John Huston Avec Humphrey Bogart (Sam Spade), Mary Astor
(Brigid O'Shaughnessy),
Gladys George
(Iva Archer),
Peter Lorre (Joel Cairo), Barton MacLane (Det. Lt. Dundy)...
L'invention du noir
Par Jean-Luc Douin Sales histoires . Qui commencent à San Francisco in
1915. For 10 dollars a day, Dashiell Hammett spend hours lurking beneath porches building, spinning the train to suspects. Costume bent tie, mustache dandy, this guy hides a stylish cut to the skull under his hat impeccable. He has scars on his legs, he voted red, spitting blood. It is a tubard alcohol. Officially, the private detective, the Pinkerton agency. Viscerally, Agent disorder. It haunts the city of vice and corruption, bars, docks, its racecourses and boxing. Hammett is not a man to protect private property, or an accomplice of social injustices. Weariness, disgust, resignation. Hammett reborn in the early 1920s. As a writer. Shady characters he has attended, these sordid affairs which he considers the "piss ass", he makes news published by the monthly
Black Mask. Hired as a copywriter at halftime to a jeweler, he first sent his first pieces for the magazine Smart Set
(forerunner of the New Yorker), and then discovered that, like him after
William Burnett, Don Tracy, James Cain
or Horace McCoy , From sports journalism, or criminal, he is the author dreamed of pulp magazines, journals selling these dark feelings printed on cheap paper. Black Mask (whose name stirs the mythology of the black wolf worn by the heroes of popular literature) has been launched to replenish the coffers of Smart Set. It will gradually move towards hard-boiled literature, the narrative "tough guy". melancholy man in dark cafés, red flamboyant neglected maddening, ambush in deadlock, pinup eyeing the search-shit while smoking a cigarette or threatening with a weapon, disturbing shadow on a wall, car skidding into the night or blond ghost wandering in the rain: it's there in the pulp magazines, paperbacks and four under, was born a genre that has since flourished in celebrating the marriage crackling the machine gun and a typewriter, then the wedding black angels with dirty faces with cinema.
Do not panic! The term
detective story was invented by Edgar Allan Poe , creator of the first amateur sleuth ( Auguste Dupin). The Sherlock Holmes
Arthur Conan Doyle is the first private detective (created in 1887), born prior to a burglar-detective (
of the Arsene Lupin
Maurice Leblanc in 1907), a priest-detective (
Father Brown Chesterton in
1910). But if we speak today film noir, if Quentin Tarantino has made a sulfurous seductive Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction is to the glory of the hard-boiled with flashy covers that should ( blankets that will influence the signs of dark films), and how Dashiell Hammett which transcended those stories where the private is less concerned with proving its ingenuity to handle mat and crowbars to smoke tons of cigarettes and empty bottles of whiskey in seedy hotel rooms. "
Hammett, jazz: it was bathed in it. It is the emblem of the thriller politically motivated, "said Alain Corneau
, author of Black Film Series (
1979). While the director Francis Girod
said her writing" that breathed cinema to each sentence. "And the writer Michel Le Bris
, creator Festival of Saint-Malo, honors "the feeling of inexhaustible energy, a dedicated writing margins, squalid alleys, the back kitchens, finally freed from the round-the-leg and affectations salonnardes.
"I have thick skin on the rest of my soul, and after twenty years in the world of crime, I can watch any murder without seeing anything other than butter in the spinach My daily grind "that is the cynical creed of
Continental Op, Hammett detective whose will be the hero of twenty-six stories and two novels before imagined Sam Spade, the narrator of the Maltese Falcon (Gallimard). Raymond Chandler find a formula for immortal honor the revolution launched by Hammett: "He lowered the crime of his Venetian vase and threw him into the creek. (...) The idea did not seem so bad away from the petty-bourgeois nibbling on chicken wings by girls in high society. " Dashiell Hammett
no heed of the high-heart-of the National Organization of Decent Literature, which sometimes asks the vice squad to capture some Pocket Books too distant puzzles pudding Agatha Christie . It is those who slip dragees pepper in thrillers too rhetorical and threw pepper on
"the cannot of politicians, preachers, men of law." Openly
launched as pavers against capitalist America, the texts of
1941, The Maltese Falcon gives the film a radical black blow punch. The filmmaker imposes places (local private apartment of the vamp, abandoned alleys), objects (telephone, felt hat, cigarettes), characters (femme fatale with eyes cobalt Levantine scented cherub murderer, gangster Epicurean to asthmatic wheezing ), and a climate where prowl morbid fears and desires. The hero is a man without moral or civil, who handles the wry humor and irony nonchalant. It has a language and a pipe to strike the dowager, a misogynist coolness towards his mistresses. Hammett knew a lot about the killers and sex maniacs, corrupt politicians and ladies nymphomaniac, the shysters and the tenants of suspicious boxes. The murder that sets the kickoff of its mysteries, he does to see a pistol shot in the fog. Afterwards
"dialogues speak instead of weapons, writes Roger Carver
in Positive (No. 75, May 1966), the characters mitraillent words", which apply to "complicate the misunderstandings, kink the adversary ". While the film noir spreads everywhere, Italy ( Obsession of Luchino Visconti, 1942 ), England ( The Third Man Carol Reed of
,
1947), Japan (
Stray Dog by Akira Kurosawa , 1949), France ( Bob Flambeur of Jean-Pierre Melville , 1955), Egypt ( of Central Station Youssef Chahine, 1958), and that all types vampirizes Hollywood contaminated with the themes of law and disorder, corruption, the inevitable fate in the misty beauty, devoted to morbid fantasies and nightmares, is created in France in 1945 by Marcel Duhamel , Gallimard, the "black Series" designation found by Prévert. soon accompanied by competitors, from other collections ("The Banner black," "The Black Widow ", "Black River "...), this collection fascinates lovers girls fatal in nylon stockings and drifts in a Chevrolet convertible, at the same time it encourages scholars to publish in French American pseudonyms. Louis Chavance becomes
Irving Ford, Louis Daquin
sign McDacking Lewis, Leo Malet is called Frank Harding or Leo Latimer, Maurice Nadeau behind Joe Christmas and
Boris Vian invents Vernon Sullivan. Dipped in The Search of Lost Time, Dashiell Hammett wrote to his girlfriend Lillian Hellman : "If Proust is not decided soon to end with Albertine, I'm afraid he will lose a customer! " . Jean-Luc Douin. Le Monde
SOME HISTORICAL WORKS Panorama of American Film Noir 1941-1953 of Raymond Borde and
Etienne Chaumeton
(Flammarion, 1988); Hard Boiled USA, History of American noir of Geoffrey O'Brien (ed. Inking, 1989); The film noir of Patrick Brion (Nathan Image, 1991);
The American Black Film , Francis of Guérif (Denoel, 1999), The Polar , edited by Jacques Baudou and Jean-Jacques Schléret (Larousse, "Totem", 2001);
The film noir, true and false
nightmares of Christmas Simsolo (ed. Papers film, 2005). Dashiell Hammett: a life , Diane Johnson of
(Gallimard, "Folio", 1992). The books of Dashiell Hammet are published in French by Gallimard. SOME CHARACTERS CONTEMPORARY Two hard to cook, Kinsey Milhone created by Sue Grafton (Threshold) VI Warshawski and by Sarah Paretsky (Threshold). But Spenser also , romantic and gourmet, due to Robert B. Parker (Gallimard). Matt Scudder , ex-cop, ex-alcoholic, of Lawrence Block . Or the first drive "homo", Dave Brandstetter of Joseph Hansen (Shores). And a Cuban : Mario Conde spotter rare books, Leonardo Padura (ed. Métailié).
To See More Photos , appointment in the Gallery ... The Maltese Falcon (1941) John Huston Preview VO: The Maltese Falcon (1941) John Huston (Duration: 2 min 44 sec)
On the one hand, a billsticker in search of his stolen bicycle in Italy affected the post-war period. In another, a seducer in light suit, charming smile at the corner of his mouth. Difficult to imagine two men more different that Anto nio Ricci, the hero of The Bicycle Thief , and its creator, Vittorio De Sica . 
started directing. Some comedies careless, then he meets with his fetish writer, Cesare Zavattini 
1995 
Octopus, a character have done live several authors. Is to First, the man who fascinates. More than the other, it resembles the ideal of the writers of the New School 
"slap a boost 
are published in French by Gallimard. 