Everything Together
My new book about Jean-Daniel Pollet
Taking a departure from my usual essays, today’s post is an announcement that you can now download — for free — my book about French New Wave “extremist” Jean-Daniel Pollet. It’s a project that I began sometime in 2021. The resulting book — Everything Together — offers a big, sweeping attempt to reckon with Pollet’s big questions (alterity, silence, loneliness, the past, etc) and the way he confronted these questions through his extremely characteristic approach to form.
You can read it here
It isn’t comprehensive, but I have tried to read everything I could get my hands on and to watch everything he made. I’ve missed a few shorts that were produced for French light entertainment show Dim Dam Dom during the 1960s, but they’re totally unavailable (for the current time, at least). You can’t blame a guy for trying.
What I’ve done, below, is reproduce the book’s preface. Thanks for sticking with me while I finished this project; it means I’ve posted a lot less often on my Substack. Hopefully I can now return to a slightly more consistent rhythm.
Maybe you’ve heard of Jean-Daniel Pollet, but there’s a greater chance you haven’t. You might have watched Méditerranée (1963) — his most celebrated film — or seen clips or stills taken from it. They crop up from time to time. You might — and this is pushing it — have seen him screened at New York’s Anthology Film Archives, as they were in October and November 2008. Daniel Kasman, writing at the time, said it was a “drive-all-night” kind of gig; an unmissable event. Well, I missed it.
You might even own one of the handsome DVDs released by les Éditions de l’oeil; they are very beautiful, but they are missing English subtitles (which doesn’t help matters).
Pollet died in 2004; his reputation outside of France remains a little muted. He’s not the name that first comes to mind when people mention the “New Wave”. But what is the New Wave, anyway? It’s not the back of Anna Karina’s head. It’s not Belmondo’s laughing mouth in an open-top sports car. It’s not Miles Davis’ soulful accompaniment to Louis Malle’s Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (1958). Then again, it’s all these things. It’s Leaud’s dawning realization — he’s going to be a father — on the floor of Veronika’s apartment; it’s the weird docudrama diary of Luc Moullet’s Anatomie d’un rapport (1976). It’s also Pollet; sort of. He thought of himself as the movement’s “younger brother”; they thought of him as their “extremist”. He made sentimental burlesques and elaborate tango trysts; he made strange, mystical documentaries about lepers and cod fishermen and cemeteries. He made films about terror, and silence, and the great gulf of loneliness that lies within our hearts.
I started writing this book sometime during Covid, or after; or the idea of it was seeded then. I can’t honestly remember. I thought I might publish it in a big, thick volume with glossy stills and really copious endnotes. Obviously I’m not doing that. Instead, this is a PDF that you can download and read in bed or on the beach or during your commute, if people still do that. As far as I know, it’s the only English-language book about Jean-Daniel Pollet. I had slightly limited access to French-language resources, so what you’re getting is a kind of squinting glance into what I think Pollet’s films “are” and what they “stand” for.
The big lights of the New Wave — and the way they’ve sedimented an ‘idea’ of cinematic chic — have deflected attention from a really diverse network of filmmakers who were active in France in the 1960s and 70s (and beyond). Arguably, it has deflected attention from itself; becoming swallowed by its own reflection. Godard became a kind of Maoist; then a holy mystic. Rohmer did his thing, through seasons and sentiments; Truffaut would turn his camera on filmmaking itself. Then he became boring. Who now talks about Jean Eustache, Luc Moullet, Jacques Rozier, Georges Franju? For every big, bold Godard, there was somebody chewing away at their “termite art” — as Manny Farber would put it. Pollet can be counted among them.
I hope you find a kind of resonance with his films. After all, there’s nothing quite like them — and nothing quite prepares you for the formal inventiveness of his style; nor his emotional heft. He brought the whole world together; paying a kind of Balzacian attentiveness to little, unconsidered things — to the world of broken objects and mournful silences. He brought tango to life; he brought getting drunk to life; he even brought death to life. He brought everything together. And hey, that’s the title of this book. Enjoy.
Owen Vince
24 September 2024, London
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