Voyage à travers le cinéma français [My Journey Through French Cinema] (2016)

(On Cable TV, July 2020) As a French Canadian, I know more than the average North American cinephile about French cinema, but I could watch French movies for another decade and not know even a fraction of what Bertrand Tavernier does about the topic. Voyage à travers le cinéma français is his opportunity to tell us about his life at the movies (from post-WW2 childhood to, as a young man, getting beaten up by policemen during a freedom of speech demonstration in front of a movie theatre), his impressions as a viewer, cinephile and critic (founding his own cineclub with friends, later launching their own critical periodical), and also as a practitioner (working for Godard and Melville, among others). Curiously, the story ends before Tavernier’s own respectable career as a director—much of Voyage à travers le cinéma français focuses on French cinema between the 1930s and 1960s. But this isn’t meant to be a history of the field as much as a trip through Tavernier’s recollections and impressions, strongly supported by critical commentary and illustrated by an exceptional number of movie clips from the movies he’s discussing. It does feel like a film study lecture, but an extremely entertaining one, with plenty of personal stories, well-chosen excerpts and quite a bit of enthusiasm for his subject. I don’t usually recommend two-and-a-half-hour-long movies, but this one almost feels too short. It’s easy to feel as if the result would have been better as a series of episodes (which is often how the film feels, as it focuses on specific directors and actors, or moments in Tavernier’s life), and indeed it did lead to an 8-episode TV series two years later. Tavernier himself is a fantastic lecturer and Voyage à travers le cinéma français is a highly personal look at decades of its history, and an often-fascinating collection of memories from a lifelong cinephile.