François Reichenbach. The Indiscreet One

François Reichenbach (1921-1993) is one of the lesser known (and least remembered) names of the French New Wave.

Between music – he studies at the Geneva Conservatory and writes songs for Édith Piaf – and painting – acting as a European art dealer for several North American museums until becoming a forger, sometime in the 1970s, inspiring and collaborating in Orson Welles’s “F for Fake” (1973) –, Reichenbach begins his filmmaking career in 1954, with movies such as “Nus masculins”. At the same time, and through the intercession of his uncle and renowned film producer, Pierre Braunberger, he directs a series of commissioned touristic movies, sometimes about Paris, sometimes about New York. His career, mostly dedicated to documentary, will be developed on both sides of the Atlantic. Having directed over a hundred films (in all genres and formats, theatrical and for TV, pornographic and on classical music, music videos, ethnographic movies, agitprop cinema, collaborating with both Chris Marker and Brigitte Bardot, Jean Cocteau and Johnny Halliday), any retrospective dedicated to his work would necessarily be incomplete.

Focused exclusively on his documentary production, this cycle appropriates the title of “L’Indiscret“ (1969), a paradigmatic movie in the filmmaker’s career. Aboard a liner called “France”, in the waters between Europe and the Americas, a couple of young models poses for a photo-novel under the eyes of the ship’s other passengers, while a director (the “indiscreet”, played by Reichenbach himself) films both the photo shoots and the tourists’ reactions. In this movie, all aspects of the French-Swiss director’s cinema come together: the national and the intercontinental, advertising and tourism, the exotic and the vulgar, voyeurism as documentary filmmaking, and mise-en-scène as (self-)representation. Starting from this movie, situated right in the middle of the director’s filmography, we suggest a panoramic walk through one of the most eclectic works of French cinema in the second half of the 20th century.

Although he was a recurring presence at the most important European film festivals during the 1960s – he won the Palme d’Or at Cannes with the mid-length film “Village Sweetness“ (1963), the Golden Bear in Berlin with another mid-length, “Portrait: Orson Welles“ (1968), and the main award in the Locarno Film Festival with his second feature, “Heart of Gold“ (1961) – and won the Prix Louis Delluc (one of the most prestigious awards in French cinema) and the Best Documentary Oscar (with his portrait of the pianist Arthur Rubinstein), his filmography was gradually forgotten, similar to what happened to his friend, and also collaborator, Guy Gilles. Despite having codirected movies with such remarkable filmmakers as Chris Marker and Claude Lelouch, the attention to his work has been reduced to just some titles that have gained cult value over the years, particularly the ironic portrait of the “flower power“ movement, a sort of anti-Woodstock, “Medicine Ball Caravan“ (1971). The vast majority of his movies is, to this day, inaccessible (if not even lost), and this cycle accounts for the small portion of his work that has been recently digitized.

From the struggle for Civil Rights in the United States, to the portrayal of the Senegalese migration in Paris in the 1960s, through the denunciation of the conditions in the North American military and judicial systems, or the fight against the Vietnam War, François Reichenbach’s cinema is guided by a careful eye towards the issues that marked his generation: the imbalances of power, the failure of institutions, and the fall of authority figures. In conjunction with this, not in contrast, but in continuity, his interest in architecture, in landscape, and everyday experiences, both in France and in the US, in Japan and, particularly, in Mexico (a country where he lived, filmed often, and from which he put together an impressive mask collection). His movies have a particular interest in the uncanny, and his gaze is distinguished by an attention to detail, turning the trivial into something grandiose, or simply unconventional. On the occasion of his death, in 1993, at the age of 70, the then French minister of culture Jack Lang said, “we have lost a remarkable man and a great director, who gave documentary filmmaking its nobility”.

The retrospective François Reichenbach. The Indiscreet One is a coproduction between Casa do Cinema Manoel de Oliveira – Serralves Foundation and Curtas Vila do Conde – International Film Festival.