Nicole Vedrès: When the Century Took Shape

Programme curated by Émilie Cauquy e Bernard Eisenschitz

 

Nicole Vedrès (1911-1965) is among those essayists who consider cinema to be a modern medium for bearing witness directly, through reflection, metaphor, comparison and image. An eye that would have become sharper through the teachings of factualism (Esther Shub, or Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera), creating a form of documentary didacticism, a “stunning synthesis” (Bazin on Marker’s Dimanche à Pékin): a genuine filmmaker of our time. According to her, intelligence is the basic material of film. Cinema took up only a small part of Vedrès’s many activities, but she left an indelible mark on Chris Marker or Alain Resnais, whom she trained, as well as on history as conceived by Godard or Harun Farocki.
Her relationship with the cinema didn’t start with a film but with a book: Images du cinéma français, published by Maurice Girodias (the future publisher of Lolita), in which she draws on the treasures of the Cinémathèque française to present an original and iconoclastic version of film history through images. The presence of Henri Langlois looms large, but one may think that Vedrès, in return, had a decisive influence on the founder of the Cinémathèque, who used her title and montage principle for his first travelling exhibition.
Which Vedrès shows in her first, most famous film, Paris 1900, a tour de force carried out over three years of researching and collecting, in a montage with poetic commentary: a powerful experiment that makes way for other itineraries than sound effects and narration paraphrasing pictures. André Bazin was astonished: “Why do chance and reality have more talent than all the filmmakers in the world?” And Vedrès, to cover her tracks a little later, in 1953: “In my opinion, history is a field that can only be grasped through imagination”.
Tired of documentaries, she wanted to work in fiction. Since no offers were forthcoming from the film industry, she turned to writing. She became a television pioneer and won over France with her charisma, becoming one of “the French’s favorite faces”. Her naturalness was surprising: no teleprompter, her eyes were amused, her tone vivacious, she made people want to drop everything and read Joyce.
Perhaps it is Alain Resnais who understood the secret of Vedrès. When On connaît la chanson came out (1997), he recalled: “And I remembered an idea that Nicole Vedrès had, whom I assisted in 1947 on Paris 1900. She said that variety songs express human feelings the most truly. With Piaf or Trenet, feelings are sometimes described with greater precision than in a subtle, tasteful novel”.

Émilie Cauquy and Bernard Eisenschitz