Jean-Claude Brisseau

on filming women

interview by ANNA DUBOSC and JULIEN BOIVENT
photography by RAPHAELE GODIN

 

We first learned about Jean-Claude Brisseau from his powerful early films. He reached a much larger audience with Noce Blanche, which introduced the young singer Vanessa Paradis to the cinema. Brisseau constructs his secret, lucid cinema with a core group of faithful acolytes who follow his special style of filmmaking, which is starkly separate from commercial cinema.

He is admired for the radiant, delicate, primal beauty of his films, their poetic brilliance, their awkward, naked power, and their evocation of the purity and lost grace of silent film. He is, in fact, an innocent, which is a rare trait that, for him, has become a cause for contempt. Typical of filmmakers like Godard, Truffaut, Herzog, and Monteiro, who occasionally appear in their own films, his distinctive diction is unforgettable.

He’s hated for portraying the physical…