The films have very little in common with conventional pornography and a lot to do with the frank but double-sided attitude towards sexuality in early 20th-century France. The crew of conventional films made the blue movies on their days off: they would borrow some costumes, a camera and a reel of film, find the nearest whorehouse and pay a couple of prostitutes a few francs to star alongside them in comic but extremely explicit sexual farces. The prostitutes' fee made up the entire cost of the movie. One of the films, The Musketeer's Dinner, features a French infantryman who has a meal in an outdoor restaurant before two waitresses decide to make his lunch a highly memorable one. It was made during the filming of a 1920 film, The Three Musketeers, in the Paris suburb of Redon, and its happy star would have been a jobbing electrician or a cameraman taking advantage of his boss's day off. The men and women who took part in the films were not professional actors. They had no concept of the camera as something that could make their image live outside of themselves - there is none of the self-consciousness that you might have expected because they had no idea that anyone would ever see these films, and they did not have the relationship with a camera that we have today. The most artful it gets is the way the women make themselves alluring by arching their arms behind their head and languidly reclining on sofas; a likely nod to Manet's nudes of the same period.

"The films give a perspective on our great-grandparents' attitudes to sex, which were that it's very much like eating and drinking," says Reilhac. "Sexual desire was a natural thing, and whatever was at hand to satisfy that desire was fair game." The films poke fun at authority figures. In 1925's Abbot Bitt at the Convent two nuns forget their sacred vows over a church altar; a youth spies on them through a hole in the wall and when Abbott Bitt arrives to discover this sacrilegious scene he starts buggering him. In 1920's School Spanking a teacher finds novel ways of disciplining her girls, before the headmaster arrives to prove himself equally ill-equipped to restore order While lesbian scenes are often provided for the titillation of straight men in modern porn films, homosexual ones are rare. But these films were an extension of the clandestine world of the brothel, where society's conventions were overturned. At a time when there was no formal concept of homosexuality as a lifestyle choice, most brothels offered young men as well as women. And the films show strong women in control, leading the way, and apparently taking as much pleasure as the men. Perhaps inevitably, the films were co-opted by the brothels themselves. Knowledge of the blue movies filtered out through the prostitutes borrowed from the huge Parisian whorehouses that the vast majority of French men visited. The brothels were a legal and important part of society that was accepted if not necessarily talked about, and most men had two sexual lives: with their wives and with their prostitutes. As young men were expected to know what to do with their (in theory) virgin brides come the wedding night, elder relatives would take them to the brothel to receive their sexual education. There are letters from Marcel Proust to his grandfather in which the great novelist complains of his father's refusal to fund his weekly visit to the whorehouse. The films were to provide an important function for those yet to be initiated into the sexual life. "The films started to be shown in Paris brothels," explains Reilhac. "We found printed programs that showed how they were screened at regular hours in the waiting rooms - young men would find out how sex went by watching them before losing their virginity to a prostitute." Wealthy private collectors, who in turn commissioned more dirty movies, bought some of the films - the grandfather of this respectable family house was one, as was King Alfonso XIII of Spain, who had a passion for women with enormous breasts. In this way the pornographic film industry was born. The reactions to Reilhac's film say a lot about the sexual mores of the countries it has been shown in. French audiences have been made up of couples and friends who have found the film hilarious, but in Spain it has been predominantly single men who have gone to see it in secret. "The word of mouth publicity that we were relying on didn't happen there," sighs Reilhac. "There was a shame element attached to it, which I think has to do with Spain being a Catholic country. The scenes with the nuns and the priest were a big problem because that was perceived as an attack on the church. I had to take out a sequence where the nuns were having penetration with candles. It is illegal to show a desecration of holy objects in Spain." In the UK the film will be released with an R-18 certificate, the designation hitherto confined to hardcore porn only available in licensed sex shops. This is the first time for over a decade that this sort of film has been given a mainstream cinema release. But the chief concern at early screenings here was over the welfare of a dog that provides a service to a lady of dubious moral fiber. "We had a screening at the Chelsea Arts Club in London," says Reilhac. "Two women were very upset about the dog, and they kept asking if it was harmed in any way. I told them that as far as I could tell that little dog was very happy. Thank God I took out the scene with the duck." Nothing is done to the dog; it is the dog that does the doing. Is something done to the duck? "Oh yes, most definitely."

Polanski won best film and best director at the Baftas this year. The story of Roman Polanski's life has been as tortuous and full of incident and tragedy as one of his dark films. His Palme D'Or for The Pianist, a story of a virtuoso's escape from a Warsaw ghetto, marks the end of a journey for a director who reportedly turned down a chance to direct Schindler's List because of the painful memories. Polanski survived the Nazi atrocities committed in the Krakow ghetto, but lost his mother in a concentration camp gas chamber. The Paris-born director went on to study at the prestigious Polish State Film College in Lodz and first came to international prominence with his feature debut Knife in the Water in 1962. A claustrophobic thriller set on a weekend yacht trip, the film angered communist officials but won the critics' prize at the Venice Film Festival. Polanski moved to Hollywood and scored a major box office success with Rosemary's Baby. Starring Mia Farrow as a woman who dreams she has been impregnated by the devil, the tense, uneasy 1968 film heavily-influenced the horror genre with its psychological tone. Tragedy overwhelmed Polanski the following year, when his heavily pregnant wife Sharon Tate was brutally murdered, along with four others, by killers acting on the orders of radical cult leader Charles Manson.

Photo: Adrien Brody, the lead in The Pianist, is also grabbing award nominations.

Dubbed the crime that "killed" the spirit of the 1960s by some, the murders were part of Manson's deranged efforts to start a race war in America. The traumatized Polanski made his return to film with an oppressive and gloomy version of William Shakespeare's Macbeth in 1971. But the pinnacle in his Hollywood career came with Chinatown in 1974. Jack Nicholson played JJ Gittes, a detective in the Philip Marlowe mould, in a California-set thriller shot through with the darker aspects of predecessors like The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep. Chinatown won an Oscar for best original screenplay, and was nominated in 11 other categories in the 1974 Oscars. Three years later, Polanski was charged with unlawful sex with a 13-year-old girl at Jack Nicholson's house. Facing a possible jail sentence if convicted, Polanski chose to jump bail and flee to Europe. From then on he was unable to return to the US for fear of arrest and imprisonment, and even avoided making films in the UK because of the danger of extradition. He was also reported to have started a relationship with actress Nastassja Kinski when she was 15. Kinski had appeared in his Oscar-nominated 1979 film Tess. During his time in Europe, he has mixed arthouse projects like 1992's Bitter Moon featuring Hugh Grant and 1994's Death and the Maiden, with Hollywood-friendly films. He made the Harrison Ford-vehicle Frantic in 1988, and in 1999 the supernatural thriller Ninth Gate, which featured Johnny Depp. Polanski's decision to direct The Pianist caused much debate, as the story of musician Wladyslaw Szpilman paralleled Polanski's own wartime experiences. It did not take long for the harrowing film to start gaining acclaim.

Globes nomination

Photo: Charles Manson.

The Pianist won the prestigious Palme D'Or award at Cannes last year and heralded the return of Polanski as a brilliant film-maker. The film, which stars best actor Oscar-winner Adrien Brody as Szpilman, has emerged as one of the critical hits of 2002. In December it secured a Golden Globe nomination for best dramatic film. It then received four awards at the 37th annual National Society of Film Critics awards in January, including best film and best director. Now it has won six Cesars and the Baftas for best film and best director. It heralds something of a return to the fold for this controversial director.

GODDARD: THE SUBLIME KINETIC EXPERIENCE

Photos from To to B: #1. Anna Karenina.  #2. Godard

Godard can be credited (or blamed) for the movies’ current obsession with self-ironic hipness, that knowing wink to the camera. His characters were the first to turn and speak directly to the lens, implicating us in the fictional ruse that we all know moviemaking is. The way they dress and smoke and talk is for our pleasure. They are cool and they know it. Godard’s lovers and gangsters are paeans to the B-movies he and his fellow critics at Cahiers du Cinema sensed were disappearing. They want to act and talk like characters they’ve seen in the movies. Godard also embraced clichés and re-contextualized them. The gun, the cigarette, the sports car: these became the props of unrequited love and political commentary, not the ingredients of plot. He once said that "all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun." When the gun showed up in a Godard film, usually in the last reel, it was taken no more seriously than Belmondo’s cocked hat.

THE ART OF RISKING OBSOLESCENCE

And there are the popular songs, the cultural references, the brand names. This is Godard at his most referential, risking obsolescence by making his films for and about the "Pepsi Generation," yet his generation is just as obsessed as Generation X with love, movies, and product. Godard also broke ground with his use of inter-titles, dividing a film’s structure into segments. There are the random bursts of narrative anarchy, the endless sequences of talk. And there are the silences—the moments when all sound vanishes... It is here that the sadness of Godard’s legacy emerges, because so much in his movies has disappeared from contemporary cinema. Consider that silence for a moment. It leaves us anchorless, groping for clues. What was the last film you saw that let the screen go aurally blank? How can a movie today even consider silence, since what films do now is tell us exactly how to think. Godard used silence as an interstice in his thoughts to allow our thoughts to enter. Thinking was what his movies were supposed to make us do. Within the genre confines of the gangster and heist films, his characters brooded about love and the state of the culture, not about how many rounds they had in their clip. Within the familiar bedrooms and cafes of the love story, lovers broke apart because their philosophies of love were opposed, not because they were mopey and narcissistic. The full frontal nudity of Maruschka Detmars in First Name: Carmen and of Myriem Roussel in Hail Mary! was used to eroticize situations. The anticipation of sex was more arousing than the act. When we see a naked woman on screen today we can be sure that intercourse will follow. Female characters today wear costumes that invite leers, but their appeal is a banal sexiness, a prurient guise in a puritanical society. Godard filmed women naked because, like Velazquez or Weston, he appreciated the line and curve of the body. Their beauty and power transfix us because we are simply asked to gaze upon it, as in the opening scene of Contempt, when the camera lingers on Brigitte Bardot’s naked body and she invites Michel Piccoli to review her assets: "What about my ankles?

Godard: "The only thing left is to show more truth about people’s lives, but they don’t want truth about that."

Do you like them? And my thighs, too?" Today’s filmmakers use Godard’s language, but too often they garble it. Jump-cuts, irony, clichés, non-linear plots. They are the means and the ends. There is very little attempt to comment on art, politics, culture, or love. The movies themselves are the comments, self-contained and precious. Contemporary movies are Godardian in their cosmetics, but not in their polemics. Controversy and argument, dialogue and disagreements—all gone. Moviemakers have co-opted Godard’s cool, but want nothing to do with his iconoclasm or his reverence. In order to pay homage to the old movies he loved, Godard overthrew the old ideas of making movies.

Photo: Picolli and Brigitte Bardot in a Godard’s film.

Godard offered his take on the state of things in a 1997 interview with the LA Times, saying, "Pictures no longer bring anything new to the audience, because they have it 100 times a day on TV ... the only thing left is to show more truth about people’s lives, but they don’t want truth about that." The directors who were willing to forge their own paths on the ground Godard broke are few in number: Cassavetes, certainly, although he was working his own turf with Shadows before Breathless became an international sensation; (Both men shared an obsession with the camera as fact-finder. They were both willing to let scenes play in order to shake out the truth.)

Scorsese, definitely, with his hand-held camera, his use of pop songs, and the naturalistic dialogue in Mean Streets. You can see Godard’s influence in Altman’s early work, especially in the meandering dialogues of Nashville, and the post-modernist twist on the cowboy and the gumshoe in McCabe and Mrs. Miller and The Long Goodbye. Wenders loved American movies as much as Godard. Both men put Sam Fuller in their films (Pierrot le Fou; The State of Things), both were fans of the road movie, and where Godard playfully exploited classic genres, Wenders found in them a sense of alienation. The synthesis of detachment and alacrity in Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise and Dead Man represent a distillation of both Wenders and Godard. Hartley’s fondness for oddball dialogue in Trust and The Unbelievable Truth, and Soderbergh’s recent structural experiments in Schizopolis and The Limey recall Godard. Tarantino’s films are loaded with Godardian touches. My favorite is in Reservoir Dogs, when Harvey Kietel attempts to ignite his lighter by snapping his fingers across it, which recalls Jean-Pierre Leaud’s trick of tossing a cigarette into his mouth in Masculine-Feminine. But Tarantino’s quoting of Godard is nothing like Godard’s quoting of Fuller, Hawks, Boetticher, and Penn. Where Godard referenced film history as a springboard to themes of cultural dislocation and revolution, Tarantino references Godard for his, and our, amusement. Nothing wrong with that, except we end up stuck in a room full of guys with skinny ties. There’s nowhere to go.

Goddard: "Any mention of art, poetry, novels, or politics leads to a charge of esotericism or, even worse, pretension."

Godard, at least in his early films, could be funny, literate, artful, and substantive all at once. He proved that movies could be intellectually challenging and watchable at the same time. The closest movies come to that ideal these days is to adapt Jane Austen or Patricia Highsmith. God forbid a character should quote Jack London (Band of Outsiders), be caught reading a biography of Velazquez (Pierrot le Fou), or go see Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (My Life to Live). Any mention of art, poetry, novels, or politics leads to a charge of esotericism or, even worse, pretension. A filmmaker is okay with quoting Obi Wan Kenobi, but not Homer. Would a line like the following, from First Name: Carmen, make it into a mainstream movie today: "When shit’s worth money, the poor won’t have assholes."? Would a writer dare to write such a thing, which is smart, funny, vulgar, and editorial all at once? Moviemakers today, in their quest for originality, often ignore what the past can teach them, and instead opt for busting taboos or, in efforts to outdo each other, shoot on digital and transfer to 16mm black-and-white and dub to Betacam and digitize to an Avid and output to Hi-8 and blow-up to Super 35mm.

Godard simply embraced the past. He shot his first color film, A Woman is a Woman (1961), in Cinemascope set to a lush score that recalled MGM musicals from the ’40s. He shot it on a studio set, with breakaway walls and key lights dangling from the ceiling. Godard’s genius was to manipulate the tried-and-true tools of moviemaking into a fresh syntax. He didn’t need to invent a new film stock, or shock us with violence or pornography, or affect a downbeat, cynical pose by turning off all of his lights and letting his characters speak in monotones. While watching Contempt or Pierrot Le Fou or Band of Outsiders, you get the sense that Godard honored the very medium of film, that he was thankful for the gifts film could bring to him and to moviegoers. Even within the romantic nihilism of Pierrot Le Fou and the doomed atmosphere of Contempt, there is consistent joy and enthusiasm. It’s unlikely a Godard film will ever lead you to heartbreak or tears, but it will invigorate your love of movies.

Godard could also be infuriating. If we honor him as the father of modern cinema, we must also hold him responsible for all the charges leveled against the art film in general, and French art films in particular. His work could be maddeningly obtuse, incomprehensible, tedious, or just plain slow and silly. His riffs on capitalism could often veer into meaninglessness. His jarring use of neon-like intertitles could sometimes be mannered and unnecessary. His insertion of snippets of classical music to break the flow of a sequence or dialogue became a wearisome habit. In the mid-’60s, with Made in the USA and Weekend, he grew bored with his tenuous interest in narrative conventions. Weekend is the type of bewildering work that would get parodied on early Saturday Night Live episodes. A woman copulates with a fish; another watches her car burn and screams, "My Hermés handbag!" A man wanders the countryside in the outfit of a Musketeer. A vision of the apocalypse this absurd can only end in cannibalism, which it does. Weekend offered up a severe view of life as a cynical riot of mayhem and amorality.

Photo: Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg in Breathless (1959).

After it, Godard dropped all pretensions to narrative structure and began a phase of his career which resulted in didactic, political tracts. His revolutionary goals became overt. His love of films—both his own and the American films he drew upon—now embarrassed him. He made films in collectives under the name of Dziga Vertov, the Russian director who experimented with cinema verité. His activism lost him his fans and his influence. He re-emerged in the ’70s with works like Detective, First Name: Carmen, and Hail Mary!, structurally difficult movies in which his politics had mellowed and his joy of filmmaking returned. The Book of Mary, the short that precedes Hail Mary!, is perhaps Godard’s most straightforward, sweet-natured film. First Name: Carmen contains languid shots of the sky and sea that resemble the contemplative passages in Ozu. Godard was now both reflective and challenging. Nearly all of Godard’s films leading up to Weekend are essential viewing. The political essays of the late ’60s and most of the ’70s are difficult to find on video; his later pictures are alternately fascinating and boring. While worth studying as another stage in the evolution of one of the world’s greatest filmmakers, they’re also difficult, talky, and lacking the ebullience of his early years.

Breathless (1959)

The title actually means "an attack of suffocation" and it refers to the cultural post-war claustrophobia of the French, still reeling from the humiliations of war and the temptations of American pop commercialism. But it also means, of course, "breath-taking," and it is. The movie challenges us to rearrange our ideas of how to listen and watch a film. The references are dizzying, the technique stunning. The movie’s pioneering use of jump cuts was a happy accident, when Godard pared down his original three-hour cut by simply editing out extraneous action rather than excising the whole sequence. The movie made Jean-Paul Belmondo, a boxer turned bit actor, into an international star, and ratified a new type of screen character: the playboy crook, both sexy and amoral, horny and indifferent, in love with himself.

The Little Soldier (1960)

Godard’s indictment of the Algerian conflict, in which a secret agent is manipulated by both sides but feels allegiance to neither. This is the movie that gave us Godard’s immortal dictum: "Film is truth 24 times a second." Like so many of his male protagonists, the "little soldier" of the title is in love with Anna Karina, and more concerned with earnest philosophical and aesthetic questions than bravery and commitment.

 My Life To Live [A Film in 12 scenes] (1962): Anna Karina stars as a woman who tells her boyfriend, "Loving you is exhausting. I’m always having to beg." So she turns to prostitution, preferring the cold transactions of sex for money. Her behavior is in sharp contrast to Godard’s approach in photographing her, allowing the camera to linger rapturously on her face. In one exquisite scene, Karina watches Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, and Godard cuts between Falconetti and Karina as if the women existed on the same exalted plane. Karina’s character claims we must all take responsibility for ourselves. She’s cut down by bullets in the film’s final scene.

Contempt (1964): A screenwriter sells his self-respect to please his wife in this searing, sad tale of marriage and betrayal and the corruptible influence of Hollywood. It’s an appreciation of filmmaking, of Fritz Lang (who plays a director), of the emotional complexities of color, and of Bardot’s luminous flesh.

Band of Outsiders (1964): "It is time to open another parenthesis and describe our characters’ feelings," says Godard himself, playing the omniscient narrator in this joyous ode to youthful anarchy and the dime store novel. Karina again stars as the ingenue seduced, corrupted, and dumped by a couple of would-be toughs. "Arthur said they’d wait for night to do the job, out of respect for second-rate thrillers," says the narrator seriously. A carefree buoyancy carries this movie through its many marvelous scenes, which include a visit to the Louvre and a long, single-take dance that must have been a helluva lot of fun to shoot.

Pierrot le Fou (1965)