Pierre-Alexandre Schwab (ed.), A week with Jean Douchet and Jacques Lassalle. Conversation on cinema and theater

During a week in June 2014, Pierre-Alexandre Schwab brought together two long-time friends, Jean Douchet and Jacques Lassalle, for a casual discussion on cinema and theater, between personal reflections, valuable lessons and essential digressions.

1st day: What kind of cinema and theater did Jean Douchet and Jacques Lassalle discover during their childhood, one from the city, the other from the village? Crossed evocations, with, finally, Auvergne in common.

2nd day: How to become a film critic through a love of films and the desire to make them? How to make theater in the extreme suspicion of theater and the passionate attendance of books and films? Comparison of experiences.

3e journée : Après des débuts adultérins (Sarah Bernhardt, The Assassination of the Duke of Guise) silent cinema was very quickly defined as the refusal of theater, from Méliès to Lumiere, from Gance to Griffith. Why? How?

4th day: Beginning of a reversal: the significant contribution to American cinema, from the 1930s and the advent of talking cinema, of European theater men (Lubitsch, Sirk, Wilder, Preminger, Kazan) under the influence of Max Reinhardt, Stanislavski, Brecht, and also, otherwise, of Pagnol and Guitry.

5th day: Affirmation of a new status of theater in cinema with the French New Wave (from Melville to Eustache, from Godard to Rohmer, from Rivette to Chabrol) and the New York independents (Cassavetes, the Mekas brothers, Barbara Loden…). Process and consequences.

6th day: When theater borrows more and more from film and digital video; when cinema gives an increasingly frequent role to the dramaturgy of the sequence shot and to the growing role of the text, dialogue or monologue…

7th day: Beyond an increasingly sterilizing script for films and the increasingly important role of Internet circuits; beyond a growing reluctance of repertoires and a regressive practice of commercial theaters (both public and private), the advent of singular, innovative and ultimately unpredictable writings (Caumon, Dumont, Desplechin, Kechiche, Guiraudie, Yann Gonzalez) in cinema.