“NÉCESSITÉ DE MOULLET”: A HOMAGE TO LUC MOULLET, FILMMAKER AND MAN OF THE MOUNTAINS
Published 08/03/2022
Sixty years after his visit to Trento and the historic article in Cahiers du cinéma, Trento Film Festival pays homage to the French director, who will be attending the Festival from 3 to 6 May to meet the public and present his films.
“Round number” anniversaries like this 70th edition of Trento Film Festival are opportunities to take a look at the past of an event, although after so many years and celebrations it may have few secrets still to reveal. In the history of the Festival there is however a moment that has strangely not been documented in the publications or news, represented by the remarkable article “Nécessité de Trento” published in Cahiers du cinéma, the most influential film magazine of all time. The article came out in March 1964, namely in the legendary “yellow” era of the publication, when great directors such as Truffaut, Rivette, Godard, Chabrol and Rohmer wrote for the magazine, also developing their editorial skills. It was a brilliant article of no less than 12 pages on film and the mountains, starting from the programme of the 13th edition of the Festival, by the young critic, filmmaker at the beginning of his career, and mountain and climbing enthusiast: Luc Moullet.
Born in 1937, Luc Moullet joined the team of Cahiers at the age of 18, and made his first films in 1960, alternating effortlessly between short and full-length films from the very beginning. Since then, he has made a total of 38 films, often playing around with forms of traditional narration, of every kind and genre: comedy, adventure, western, erotic, diary, road movie, documentary, detective film etc. They are all linked by a taste for the comic – Moullet is often considered as the only facetious filmmaker of the Nouvelle Vague, or French New Wave, and by an obsessive passion for the mountains. A native of the Southern Alps, he wisely followed the advice of Ernst Lubitsch (“when you know how to film the mountains, you will also know how to film actors”). Many of his works are set in the mountains and valleys, while several have walkers and climbers as their protagonists.
The “Nécessité de Trento” article opens as follows: «The Festival in Trento is the only one, among many, where form and substance coincide, along with container and content, something which Cortina and Valladolid can only dream of. What is there in Mannheim, Barcelona, Bordighera or Annecy that corresponds to the essence of the documentary, colour, sense of humour or animation? The festivals held there could equally well take place in Gelsenkirchen, Bari, Caceres or Mariaud». The article culminates with a demand for space on mountain film in the pages of a magazine such as the Cahiers, which was founded in 1951, only a year before the festival: «The mountains – and hence in theory mountain film – are an integral and necessary part of life – and thus of film. Mountain film is not a speciality for the initiated, and it is not possible to do without it, like animated film. This is a fact and an aesthetic necessity, which those who have forgotten about it for thirteen years authorise me, indeed oblige me to deal with».
Moullet also returned to the festival in Trento the following year, writing a taxonomic summary of the 14th edition (which concluded with a comment of appreciation regarding the quality of milk in Trentino) for issue 160 of Cahiers in November 1964, while plans for two films unfortunately never made should have brought him to the Dolomites: Vortex, to be filmed in the Bocchette Alte in the Brenta Dolomites, and Gusela inspired by the Gusela del Vescovà pinnacle, a symbol of the alpine foothills and the Belluno Dolomites.
Almost sixty years later, the special programme for Nécessité de Moullet – a homage to Luc Moullet, filmmaker and man of the mountains, thus pays due homage not just to one of the most “mountain-focused” filmmakers in the history of film, but also to the person to whom the Festival owes probably the most significant and intelligent account of the event ever published by the international press.
In addition to some of his short films, four of his full-length “alpine” films will be presented: from the early part of his career Les contrebandières (1966), on the amorous competition between two female smugglers who discover they have the same lover, in an area straddling the frontier, and the astonishing Une aventure de Billy le Kid (1971), one of his best-known films, a surreal psychedelic western featuring an extraordinary Jean-Pierre Léaud in the role of the legendary American bandit; whereas the more recent works are Les naufragés de la D17 (2002), about a group of eccentric characters who come across each other in the most desolate mountainous region of France, and the atypical documentary La terre de la folie (2009), in which Moullet investigates, in his own inimitable way, the unusually high incidence of psychosis and mental illness in his native region.
In 2021 the Cinémathèque française in Paris dedicated an unprecedented and extensive retrospective to Moullet, and his autobiography “Mémoires d’une savonnette indocile” was published in France. In this he presented himself as follows: «Thanks to Truffaut, for 65 years I have been writing about film, and introduced by Godard, over 54 years I have made funny films about serious subjects, Marxism and Taylorism, vaginas and clitorises. I have worked with all film genres. I will leave behind me the phrase: “Morality is a matter of tracking shots”. I am placed between Brecht and Courteline, between Buñuel and Tati. I’m a maverick originally from a city in the foothills of the Alps, a marathon runner capable of cycling up to an altitude of 5,390 metres, but who doesn’t know how to ski, dance, swim or drive».
Luc Moullet will return to Trento from 3 to 6 May to meet the public and present his films. The homage is supported by the Institut français Italia and organised by Sergio Fant, responsible for Trento Film Festival’s film programme.
