Yesterday we saw Jean-Paul Civeyrac's A Paris Education, a sober and realistic tale of the intellectual and personal travails of young artists. I was taken back because its very realistic, un-romanticized review of the slow progress of a young person's thinking regarding their life and education as they make their way slowly through the typical obstacles of creating and thinking. Especially how it works with those around you who encourage and hamper your way. This black and white film is shot in a very straight forward fashion but that is what makes it more compelling and visually attractive. Though you think you will see lots of Paris but what you see is more of the run of the mill Paris and interiors of apartments, bars, and classrooms. Sounds like an Education. The acting is very strong and the side critique of film is edifying as the name dropping makes a lot of sense to those who love film. Only part I fault is the use of music-both pieces (Bach and Mahler) are a bit overused throughout the film but it is a minor quibble.Here is an interview by Civeyrac on the film:
No Film School: Why make a film about film school?
Jean-Paul Civeyrac: I didn't exactly want to make a film about film school. What I tried to do instead is to make a film about young people's desire for cinema, and these are people who meet each other at a university where they study film. I tried to capture the intensity and the seriousness of this desire for cinema that takes place at a time when studying is very important, as well as the work of artists—whether it's filmmakers or poets or painters or writers who fill us up. This is a time when these choices are really essential in a life.
NFS: Some of the students in the film grapple with the idea that modern cinema is somewhat rehashed or contrived. Do you take that stance on modern cinema?
Civeyrac: This is the case for many young people who are starting out in cinema or are students in film. They find that contemporary cinema, whether it's commercial film or auteur cinema, somehow does not correspond to their expectations. It is this feeling of being unsatisfied and looking for something else. These unsatisfied young people have to look toward the cinema that does speak to them, and that can be both in works from the past, but also in works from the present.
In the film, we have this character of Eloise who makes films that are very artistically demanding and who Mattias recognizes as a very interesting filmmaker. I think that's what's at stake with these people's relationship to cinema—they're on a deep quest to find what speaks to them and what they identify with in cinema.
NFS: Many critics are saying that this film is, at least in part, an homage to the French New Wave. What of the style or aesthetic did you bring to this film?
Civeyrac: I think the essential contribution of the French New Wave was that it did not bury itself in commercial mechanisms of cinema. What the French New Wave filmmakers did is they tried to film or capture something that they themselves had lived. In fact, I have to say, I don't think that it's only the French New Wave. It's all the New Waves of the entire world throughout the 1960s.
If my film is close to the New Wave films, it's in this way of trying to capture something of my life experience. I tried to film something that is close to me—something that I know—and to do it outside of the machinery of the screenplay and so on. I wanted the film to discover its own style in doing so.
NFS: Can you talk a bit about your aesthetic approach to the film in terms of shooting in black and white and keeping your camera movement simple?
Civeyrac: I'll start with black and white. I felt like black and white allowed me to add a little bit of fiction—something novelistic to what ultimately was quite close to a chronicle of contemporary students' lives. So, the black and white added some feel of a story. Black and white also allows one to capture the subjectivity of the protagonist.
In terms of style, I've made films where the camera was practically a character in the film. In this case, I did the contrary, which is that I attempted to have the camera basically just record what was going on in front of it: the dialogue. The camera is not trying to make things more beautiful than they are. I think the camera is at the same level as what's going on with the characters. The camera takes what the characters are going through very seriously, and it's not trying to create anything other than that particular thing.
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