François Truffaut
Jules et Jim (Jules et Jim) by Henri-Pierre Roché.
The book came out two years ago, but it didn't get much attention. The reviews for this book are neither good nor bad, and in fact it elicits almost nothing. For an obscure novelist, this treatment is not out of the ordinary. The first thing that caught my attention was its title, and I was immediately delighted by the melodious and loud tones of these two Js, then I turned to the back cover and read the author Henri-Pierre Roche, born in 1879 , this novel is his first novel. What I was thinking about now was that this newcomer novelist was already seventy-six years old! What kind of novel is a novel written by a man in his seventies?
From the first line, I fell in love with Henri-Pierre Roche's writing. My favorite writer at the time was Jean Cocteau, for his sentences, the obvious dry sentences and precise imagery. I have found that Henri-Pierre Roche is more or less than Coker, using the least extravagant and simple words, organized into extremely short sentences, to achieve a kind of poetic equivalent. Texture in prose style. In this style, there is an emotion born from the hole, from the emptiness, from the pared-back, concise words. Later, when I had the opportunity to read his manuscript, I was able to take a closer look at the style, and I observed that this deliberate, innocent style emerged from countless smeared words. In a whole page of frank, schoolboy-like writing, he cut out so much that he left only seven or eight sentences, and two-thirds of those seven or eight sentences were to be cut out again. "Ancestor and Zhan" is a love story written in telegraph style by a poet who tries to forget his own culture and arranges his words and ideas as concisely and concretely as a farmer planting rice.
It's easy to imagine that my passion for this novel extends to its characters and their love stories. I usually prefer watching movies to reading books, and I regularly watch sixteen to twenty movies a week. I live only for movies. While writing a film review for Arts-Spectacles, I had the opportunity to put my passion into practice. And while reading Zu and Zhan, I had the feeling that I was in an unprecedented case in cinema: expressing the love of two men for the same woman, and leaving the "audience" unable to do between these characters Making an emotional choice, they let the three lead and love them as equals. This oppositional choice touched me so much in this story that the editor of the bookstore introduced it to the current comment: "Pure love in a triple room."
A few months later, I was technically watching a film in the editing room that made me Exciting American film, a confessional western: The Naked Dawn by Edgar G. Ulmer. Some of my thoughts led me to the novel Zu and Zhan, and in the review I wrote for that Western movie, there was this passage: "One of the most beautiful contemporary novels I've ever known is Henry Pi El Roche's Zu and Zan. This novel tells the story of two friends and their mutual love who, thanks to a re-measured and new aesthetic moral stance, lived their entire lives, Loving each other tenderly, almost without contradiction. Rogues of the Border Town made me realize that the novel Zu and Zhan could be made into a movie.”
A week later I received a letter: "Dear Mr. François Truffaut, I am very moved by the words you wrote in the magazine for Zu and Zhan, especially the following sentence The words '...thanks to a new, re-considered, aesthetically moral stance'. In the book you received, Two English Girls and the Continent, I hope you'll reiterate more on this Found. Henri-Pierre Roche." I replied. We corresponded fairly regularly for the next three years, until his death. I visited him two or three times, at his Meudon home. The train drove all the way to the end of his garden. Henri-Pierre Roche was seventy-seven years old, very tall and thin, as gentle as his fictional characters, and he was very much like the Marcel Duchamp he often referred to. (Marcel Duchamp). The painter Duchamp is a figure that Roche admires very much. He also recognizes Derain, Picabia, le Douanier Rousseau, the customs officer, Max Ernst, Brague (who fought together in the same ring) , who was once the lover of Marie Laurencin, introduced Picasso to Americans. Forty years later, he discovered Walls, and for the rest of his life he admired Duchamp, in his third novel, Victor (unfinished, published in 1977). is his fictional character.
Back in 1956, in my first few letters, I told Roche that if I could make a movie one day, I would definitely make Zu and Zhan. He was delighted with the idea, and we decided at the time that I would organize the backbone of the script and he would write the dialogue himself, according to his phrase: "unblocked and tightened dialogue." On November 23, 1956, he wrote: "Have you read Monamant se marie by Thora Dordel? It is so well written that you may not find it. When it arrives, I can lend you mine. In 1905, I had translated Chekhov's Uncle Vanya from Russian. It was too early. No one was going to read it then, The same thing happened in Schnitzler's La Vania in 1906."
In December 1957, when Henri-Pierre Roche was seventy-eight years old, he traveled to see my first short film, Les Mistones, and he volunteered a short essay specifying I wanted to give it to "Art" Weekly, but as a film critic of this newspaper at the time, I didn't dare to publish it. I told Roche that my desire to do Zu and Zhan was always strong, but the plan was still too difficult for a new director, and I had to do Les Quatre cents coups first. He understood my position, but he wrote me a letter, a letter that I couldn't pay much attention to in my twenty-five-year-old egoism, he said: "One day when you are shooting Zu and Zhan, If I were alive, I would be happy. I would like to work with you as much as possible. If you find a reason or an excuse for us to meet, please let me know."
With certainty in Jean Renoir's grand vision There is a kind of cognate relationship with Roche's wisdom. I sent him a Cahiers du cinema. In his letter of March 18, 1958, he said: " Thank you so much for your Conversation with Jean Renoir. It was a revelation to me, this conversation is so wise and educational, so touching, so inspiring, so human, so real.” Then He talks about his son, Jean-Claude, of whom he is becoming more and more proud: "My son works in the Camargue region, his films are very successful, he has been invited to foreign film festivals, and he made Jean-Claude • Jean Rostand and Jean Painleve's biopic, "The Mating Festival of Insects," with his mastery of pure beauty, keenness of colour and keen observation, also attracted attention . He will be happy to show his films for you to watch."
When he autographed and sent me "Two English Girls and Continental", he attached a sentence that remained in my memory forever, he said that if the novel did not have "Two English Girls and Continental" If Zu and Zhan succeeded, he would quit writing. Nonetheless, in a letter dated October 22, 1958, he wrote: "A third novel is a must! I have already started, and I am sure there are rhythms you will like. But I have not Find a unified point of view." This is the Victor I mentioned earlier.
In the winter of 1958 and 1959, I was filming "The Four Hundred Downs," and Jean-Claude Brialy came for a night scene on the Rue Montmartre Do a one-minute friendship show. To my surprise, he brought in Jeanne Moreau, an actress I admire, who played "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" in theaters.
Because it was raining and it was cold, we shot some quick and impromptu little scenes. Inspired by Jeanne Moreau, I sent Roche four pictures of her for his opinion. On April 3, 1959, he wrote back: "Dear young friend, what a letter you sent me...Thank you very much for the picture of Jeanne Moreau. I like her and I am very happy She likes Cates! I'd like to know her, come and see me, and I'll wait any time you please."
I received this letter on April 5, and four days later, Henri-Pierre Roche , died extremely peacefully in his bed during his daily injections.
In 1961, I finally decided to start making Zu and Zhan, and the writer was gone, unable to fulfill his promise to write dialogue that had the function of "unblocking and tightening". But we, me and Jean Gruault were as faithful to the original as possible. Zu and Zhan may well be the only New Wave film to include extensive commentary—those “narrations” that are drawn almost entirely from the book.
From time to time during filming and editing, I overturned the script, reopened my novel, or quoted the glowing sentences here and there, melding them into the film's soundtrack to "save the big picture."
The purpose of this preface is to give the reader a better understanding of the author and his two amazing novels. I'm not going to talk about the anxiety and frenzy of filming here, except to talk about Jeanne Moreau, who always gave me courage when I was confused. She is an actress and a woman of her nature that makes Cates — Katherine in the film — flesh in our eyes, her sham, mad, passionate and abusive (but especially It's her life love, I'm talking about a veritable admiration). Oskar Werner, an Austrian actor, is admirable. Another new actor, Henri Serre, who is tall, lanky, gentle and honest, plays the role. I chose him because he resembled Henri-Pierre Roche.
At the beginning of 1962, the film was released to the public. The main feature was preceded by a beautiful short film, "The Life of Insects" by Jean-Claude Roche, about the reproduction and mating of dragonflies. Zu and Zhan was an immediate success, making the original novel a bestseller nine years after its publication, and was quickly translated into English, Spanish, Italian and German. I am doubly happy.
Jeanne Moreau and I, we receive letters from all over - not just France - letters of importance. Some young mothers named their newborn babies after Zhan or Zu or Katherine. I would like to mention a particularly important letter from an elderly lady, signed Cates, the real heroine of Zu and Zhan, the woman whom the two friends had long loved together: sitting in the dark In the cinema, I was terrified of the disguise I was about to face, the more or less irritating contrasts, but I was quickly seized by the magic of you and Jeanne Moreau, and those who lived blindly things wake up. Henri-Pierre Roche is "good at telling" the story of the three of us, and it is not surprising that he has a familiar grasp of successive plots. And you, with what talent, with what comprehension, are you able to make the point of our three-person intimacy—despite the inevitable cuts and compromises—so palpable? In this regard, since the other two are no longer alive, I cannot say to you, "Yes, it is so." I am your only true witness.
After watching the movie, Cocteau recalled Henri-Pierre Roche and wrote to me: "I know the author of this novel very well, a very delicate and noble soul."
I get the real Catherine's compliments, but it's the real account that comes to my mind a lot. Henri-Pierre Roche was long gone, unable to harvest the fruits he had planted, and it started to torment me. I used to firmly believe that I was too young to be able to express on camera what Roche wrote with his pen. I was not yet thirty years old when I made "Zu and Zhan", but what I tried so hard to make was not a "film for young people", I wanted to make a film for "old people", I didn't See if I got it right!
Years have passed, and my mind often brings me back to Henri-Pierre Roche. For fun, I reread Two English Girls and the Continent at least once a year. The idea of turning it into a movie has not yet arisen, because it involves not a linear narrative, but the presentation of a series of literary elements, like real material records: those excerpts from diaries, letters and monologues. In several places, Roche divided the whole page into two columns, in order to compare the diaries of the two sisters and the hero Claude (obviously none other than the author himself), like "Zu and Zhan", these materials are Biographical. Dennis Roche once told me that Ann in the book became a set designer or costume manager for the Russes Ballet under Shaggy Diaghilev.
"Two English Girls and the Continent" was written after "Zu and Zhan", but the story happened before, Claude was just coming of age, and Zhan was in his prime. The main characters in "Two British Girls and the Continent" are younger than those in "Zu and Zhan", and their stories are more sad and more intense. The wit and serene tone of the narrative are absent in Two English Girls and Continental, whose fictional characters recreate their true experiences in the author's frenzied torn style.
The two novels are very different, and the novelist himself explained it very clearly. In the introduction of "Two English Girls and the Continent", he said: "We feel that it is more moral than "Zu and Zhan", and the diary quoted in it is completely candid. Over
time, I have come to believe that Two English Girls and Continental is a better novel than Zu and Zhan, but I still insist that it cannot be adapted because three of the The main characters rarely get a chance to be together, and their strongest emotions are communicated from a distance.
In 1971, I experienced my first depression and was admitted to the hospital for a type of sleep therapy. I only took one book, Two English Girls and the Continent, and every time I woke up I read a few pages, I took notes on the edges of the book, like I was going to adapt it to a screenplay, and at some point, I read He decided to leave this miserable place, shut himself up with Jean Gruvol and start working.
We wanted to make a more physical film than Zu and Zhan; this film was not about physical love, but "a physical film about love". The actors are Jean-Pierre Leaud and two British actresses, Kika Markham and Stacey Tendetec, in "Two English Girls and Continental". into a movie. When it was released publicly in France, the audience's reaction was lukewarm, but over the years, I believe, the film has built up some popularity. In any case, I feel that I have grown a lot during the filming, whether it is the understanding of movies, or the understanding of life, love, and emotional violence, the harm and cruelty that people innocently bring to each other when they are in love.
When Henri-Pierre Roche died on April 9, 1959, there were only a few newspaper mentions and only a few lines. Because this remarkable man was not famous all his life. But recently Georges O'Shique devoted a page to him in his book, titled: The Obscure Life of Henri-Pierre Roche.
His father died at a young age, Henri-Pierre Roche grew up with his mother's authoritarian enthusiasm, and he read politics, but painting seemed to appeal to him more than a career in administration. He studied painting at the Julian College, but gave up because he was not talented enough. He began to collect paintings and translated some Chinese poems, which were composed by George O'Sik and Aleb Hussle and Fied Barrow. Roche was an amateur all his life because he always preferred other people's work to his own. His political science teacher, Alber Sohail, gave him a revelation (a dialogue I adapted from the film) that he kept on:
What do you want to do in the future?
diplomat.
Do you have great wealth?
no.
Could you, then, have some legal way to add some famous or distinguished person's last name to your last name?
impossible.
Give up your plans to become a diplomat.
So what can I do?
A person with an exploratory mind.
That's not a profession.
Not a profession yet, but it will be in the future. The heart of exploration can become a profession, and the French have long shut themselves in their borders and should travel a lot. You can always find a job at a newspaper to pay for your travel.
It may have been during a trip to Germany around 1907 that Roche met the Jewish writer Frantx Hessel, who became his friend and, later, "Ancestors and Accounting" "The ancestors.
Roche, who speaks fluent in German, also made other German friends whom he admired: Peter Altenberg, Keyserling, Arthur Schnitzler
about Roche's deeds have been narrated over and over again, and perhaps the first act of excellence that he himself was proud of was his central arrangement of Gertrude Stein's meeting with Picasso, which was probably 1910 Around the same time, he became a buying advisor to the American collector John Quinney, and their collaboration and friendship continued until Quinney's death in 1925.
During the 1914 war mobilization, Roche declared that he was not fit to serve in the army. He was secretly falsely accused of being a German spy - only because he had important correspondence with the Outre-Rhin region of Germany within a few years - and was arrested and imprisoned for two weeks. Because of this experience, he has published a small fifty-page book, Deux dsmaines a la conciergerie Pendant la Bataille de la Marne, which already reveals that lively, cheerful style.
But I always have a feeling that Roche is hiding his abundant emotions, and this is his nature. The reason why he immediately set off for the United States is not unrelated to the unjust injustice he suffered. In New York, he met Duchamp again. Duchamp is now busy with his important work: "Even, the bride is stripped naked by her men".
At this time, New York was during the First World War, and hordes of artists who came to take refuge here were unscrupulous, and the commotion turned the city's art scene. Picabia was one of them, along with his musician wife Gabizia Buffy, Edgar Wahls, and the one who seemed to resemble Wilde, who mysteriously disappeared in Mexico in 1918. Quirky poet boxer Arthur Jaffin.
After John Quinney's death, Roche continued his career as a forensic buyer, at this time working for a legendary figure, Le Rajah dindore, who took him on long trips, especially often Go to India. In 1920, under the influence of the poet Jules Laforgue, whom he admired for his "legendary morality", Roche was preparing to publish his second little book, Don Juan. (Don Juan), the same year Cocteau published his La Noce Massacre. "Don Juan" is a collection of twenty-eight variations of the story of the prodigal son of Don Juan (Don Juan and the Traveler, Don Juan and Denis, Don Juan and Ba Juana, etc.). On the eve of the book's publication, Roche's mother expressed her dissatisfaction, and to appease her, he published it under the pseudonym Jean Roc.
The experience of World War II and the German occupation of France forced Roche to mature, he finally got married, had a child, taught French, sketching, chess and gymnastics, and he bought a house. Perhaps it was during this time that he began to draft Zu and Zhan, which was not published until 1953. After the war Roche published his art reviews, document reports of some exhibitions. Picasso and Duchamp were so well-known at this time that Roche was often asked to provide his testimony of the period of French painting history that began at the beginning of the century.
A quote he wrote for his friend Duchamp also applies to himself: "His most beautiful work is his use of time." In fact, Roche dedicated his life to women. In order not to offend his mother who exclusively loved him, he remained single for a long time. He lives alone, but at the same time maintains a fixed relationship with his three lovers, plus the passing women who are tempted by him almost every day. His work is about these things and love affairs. For almost fifty years between 1905 and his death, he wrote daily and methodically in his diary, a documentary account of his romantic adventures. The diary is occasionally written in English and German, also to escape the jealous and curious prying eyes of this or that mistress of the moment.
After Roche passed away, I had the consent and cooperation of his wife Dennis to retype most of these diaries and save them from damage. But the typist we hired for the job at home, after two years of work, refused to continue to transcribe the diaries, because she was so exposed by the words and deeds of this twentieth-century Don Juan— - She thought she felt - disturbed by the "unconscious cruelty".
I should have let this lady who typed know that Henri-Pierre Roche is not reserving the pursuit of truth and love to men: Cates in Zu and Zhan has not become the new woman in recent years Is it an example of ism?
If these diaries are published, I am afraid that there will be more than 20 volumes, and the French publishing houses I have contacted have declined. Because Henri-Pierre Roche was still not a famous person in their eyes, let alone those famous friends or mistresses mentioned in his diary, he all used pseudonyms to cover them up, making them unrecognizable.
Because of this, the publication of these diaries was deemed unrecoverable. These private diaries will still retain their obscurity. Fortunately, Roche's old age left two splendid novels for his past experiences, making him no longer unknown.
Of all the comments made for him, I particularly like the following passage written by Jean Paulhan, his friend who was responsible for the publication of Zu and Zhan at Gallimard: "Yes , he's tall, with an air of sullen melancholy. He's a little too clear, too humble, and he's not surprising because he's confusing. He's full of love for people. He thinks people are worthy of respect."
This is the end of this long sequence, it is your turn to discover Henri-Pierre Roche, and you will be awe-inspiring in his tenderness. You will bring him into your life as a friend. I hope you will love him.
View more about Jules and Jim reviews
