The French Cinema and the Jazz....

by Vagner Pitta.   Cinema, the seventh wonder in the world of art! Or better, movies with jazz, a perfect combination that, for a JAZZofilo goes beyond entertainment or distraction! In terms only of cinema - independent of having jazz on track or not - it's impossible not to mention the role of American influence: from the silent Charlie Chaplin, through noir, Orson Welles, the thrillers of Alfred Hitchcock ... Finally, until we get the more "eclectic" and "commercial" and Brian De Palma, Robert Altman, David Lynch, Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Clint Eastwood ... I also like many of Woody Allen's dramas (where the neurosis and comedy are worked with great intelligence) and I also love the films of Tim Burton, a master of fantasy and dark tales (a sort of Edgar Allan Poe movie, to be sure).

However, when it comes to "study film - and I'm not speaking in the academic study, but the uncompromising reflections and observances that every moviegoer has the right and pleasure of doing them - it seems to me that there is nothing more conceptual and compelling than the film industry - especially the French and Italian. This is despite the big-budget Hollywood films - which are sometimes rich in features and effects, but poor in concept art - the one, I love European cinema, for example, are cheap productions that have had a wealth of artifacts technological, innovated the technique of filming, photography and concept which works with the anxieties, wishes and human sins.

In terms of compatibility between cinema and jazz, European film fails to be sound just as flooded as the American cinema - especially as the U.S., of course, has always been the birthplace and home of this musical genre which, incidentally, is entralaçou with the film and cartoon since the beginning of the swing era and early talkies, at the end of 20 years: so that, by chance, the first production of the talkies was a film about jazz called The Jazz Singer (1927) with the singer and actor Al Johnson. But the French cinema, for example, is a huge storehouse of interesting productions where several jazz solos - from bebop to avant-garde - has frequently appeared as trails of films that have immediate or later come to be considered cult classics and perennial European cinema.

If you also like jazz, you also distinguishes itself through a more artistic movie, full of questions, controversies and discussions, the best is that in some cases, the jazzy soundtrack to appear only as a "tempeiro the most" in films, conceitualmentes are already in itself provocative, reflective and even offenders: as some films by Louis Malle, for example. Who has not watched a heart murmur (1971), where New Orleans jazz of Sidney Bechet and dazzling bebop of Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker are responsible for a very controversial subject: what is the incest between mother and child? Poizé, a heart murmur, like the cool Lift to the Scaffold (1958), which is the soundtrack signed by Miles Davis, invetarado was directed by Louis Malle, the director who lived outside the movement Nouvelle.

But not only were the compositions of Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and Miles Davis that gave rise to French films. The spirited hard bop drummer Art Blakey - with his quintet Jazz Messengers - was also commissioned by the great director Roger Vadim - another exponent of the Nouvelle Vague - to give color to the film as love affairs (1959), a modern adaptation of the novel 'Les Liaisons dangereuses', published in 1782 by writer Choderlos de Laclos. In "Round Midnight: Back By Midnight" (1978), directed by Bertrand Tavernier and the soundtrack signed by Herbie Hancock, Dexter Gordon the Bebopper appears not only as a musician, but as the leading actor in a drama set in early of the 50's, when the bebop and cool jazz.

The story, written by French writer Francis paudream - which had been a friend and protector of the pianist Bud Powell in his sad days of exile in Paris - is inspired by the dramatic lives of SaxTenor Lester Young and Bud Powell's own. Round Midnight has become at once the most classic of world cinema in Jazz inspired entirely - not to mention Dexter Gordon was named the Oscar for Best Actor and Herbie Hancock won for Best Original Score

Equally interesting is the use of jazz with a more avant-garde in some French films. In Un Eté Sauvage (1970), film director Marcel Camus - who in 1959 had already filmed Black Orpheus, inspired by the play Orfeu da Conceição by Vinicius de Moraes (and with music by Tom Jobim) - climbed altoísta Marion Brown to compose a soundtrack that did justice to the title and the story of a waiter who lives between the world of hippies and street performers and the world's rich and powerful as he is seduced by a rich typical madame to promote the husband's voyeuristic desires -- So what free jazz, Marion Brown, recorded for the movie on disc and released under the title Le Temps Fou, he had his guise as a "psychedelic," even though, apart from the electric piano, the instruments used are all acoustic.

As for Les Stances à Sophie (1970), Israeli director Moshe Mizrahi order to track the musicians of the magnificent Art Ensemble of Chicago and the soul singer Fontella Bass, then wife of trumpeter Lester Bowie. Les Stances à Sophie, though directed by an Israeli, is also a cult film that represents the Nouvelle Vague, as Mizrahi's own, and settled in France at the time, was also attuned to the aesthetics of that movement.

By the way, LP, CD and DVD were recently reissued and reissued by the label Soul Jazz Records: Disk Les Stances à Sophie Art Ensemble of the Chicaco is considered a classic of the second phase of free jazz on his remarkable distinction, which is a footprint more ascrecentada soul and funk to avant-garde sound of the band, and pinches the influence of Paris - remembering, moreover, at that time not only Lester Bowie and his comrades in the Art Ensemble of Chicago were "exiled" in France, but several other musicians free American jazz such as Cecil Taylor, Steve Lacy, Archie Shepp and Ornette Coleman came from the U.S. to explore the European market, where they had, in fact, space to display a sound more purely artistic and experimental.

So here are some tips results of my assessment in French cinema: Louis Malle, Roger Vadim, Bertrand Tavernier, Marcel Camus and Moshe Mizrahi were only some among many, directors who have used jazz as a soundtrack of his films.

For those not familiar with this type of movie, imagine the combination of rustic landscapes of the towns of Paris and its old baroque buildings, its "club du jazz" or his record stores with the most romantic landscapes of gardens, parks, works of art and luxury hotels, and a touch of pure lyricism, romanticism and moralism in conflict with the sinful rot hidden among the finest dresses and jackets of the haute bourgeoisie, and the glimpses of social movements, artistic and philosophical, such as feminism, and the sexual liberation of a rebellious youth and then gives you to have more or less the sense of nostalgic atmosphere and realistic these movies - especially movies that have characterized the nouvelle vague of the 60s and 70s protest movements of the bourgeoisie and the values moral undertaken by a group young filmmakers - among them Louis Malle, Roger Vadim and Marcel Camus - who obviously did not have much money or many financial incentives pra do their filming.

Not coincidentally, in 1968 the French people staged a major cultural revolutions the world has ever documented: the Revolution of 1968 gave effect to the freedom of expression of a youth since the mid-50s with the advent of rock'n'roll U.S. , was already aspiring to have greater participation in society, but more than that, the Revolution of 1968 was a revolution that sudden and global, from the outset, has become a landmark, a starting point for other movements, and events social changes such as environmental movements, the actual explosion of feminism, the emergence of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), social protest in defense of minorities and human rights, and the protests against the policies of the Cold War against regional wars and colonial occupations (such as the Vietnam War, for example).

Indeed, the Revolution of 1968 not only came to be understood as an extension of social movements in America in the 60 - including the struggle of Martin Luther King on civil rights of blacks and the protests against the Vietnam War - as also influence, in turn, the movements in the U.S. and the rest of the world from that date. And jazz, as well as rock'n'roll and film, artistic elements were essential for the formation of the new world of thought initiated by this new youth. Click on the images to access more information and / or to download the tracks right here on Blog Farofa Modern.
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