THE FILMS OF LUC MOULLET

While little known in the US, Luc Moullet has endured as a "modest master" of French cinema since the late 1950s, admired by fellow filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard and Jacques Rivette. In the words of Jean-Marie Straub, he is the "only heir to Luis Bunuel and Jacques Tati." At the age of 18, Moullet joined the ranks of Cahiers du Cinema, where he was the first to champion Hollywood B-directors like Samuel Fuller and Edgar G. Ulmer. Along with his other, better-known critic colleagues at Cahiers, Moullet would later turn to filmmaking himself, creating an unclassifiable body of work characterized by its scrappiness, eclecticism, bawdy irreverence, and its rejection of technique and pomposity. His filmography encompasses everything from a Dadaist western with Jean-Pierre Leaud, to Brechtian, burlesque slapstick, to a documentary tracking the distribution of food around the world, all made with next to no money. In addition to his prolific output as a writer and director, Moullet also produced key films by such contemporaries as Marguerite Duras and Jean Eustache.

A self-styled "unruly piece of soap," Moullet's persona is deliberately hard to pin down: he's both an intellectual and a clown whose mission is "to educate through laughter." Always self-deprecating and profoundly offbeat, often appearing in his films as a talented comic performer, he stands as the true comedian of the Nouvelle Vague. Today, Moullet remains one of the most essential yet unheralded figures of his storied generation of French cineastes.

The set includes

Moullet's brilliant, sarcastic first feature stands as the finest period document of French cinephilia, and features cameos by Samuel Fuller, Claude Chabrol, Andr? T?chin? and Eric Rohmer. Two identically-named young students meet just after moving to Paris. Over the course of the film they discover the city, rate its monuments, look for an apartment, eat at a restaurant, visit the country, and become involved in a wide variety of moviegoing-related shenanigans.

The Smugglers is a defiantly amateurish non-adventure adventure film concerning three people off in the wilds with no skills whatsoever, made in advance of May ?68. In its terminally digressive, aggressively slapsticky way, the film manages to encapsulate an entire era. Called by Jean-Marie Straub ?maybe the best film not made by Godard,? and by Moullet himself as, ?the best film of Robbe-Grillet,? this movie about borders and barriers sports a cameo appearance by the director, who is listed in the credits as ?pompous fool.? 

Jean-Pierre L?aud and Rachel Kesterber star in the greatest French Western ever made. Never released in France but distributed in South America in an English-language version dubbed by Moullet himself, Billy?s dark tale of lust and revenge swings wildly between a slapstick insanity and a delirious experimentation that are kith and kin with Wellman's Yellow Sky, Vidor's Duel in the Sun, Godard's Week-end, and Garrel's La cicatrice interieure.  In rewriting an old saw (cinema and a girl is a gun, indeed), Moullet tackles favorite themes?time, landscape, exhaustion?with relish.

Co-directed with Antonietta Pizzorno, this "sex film" is a clinical exploration of a couple working through a series of problems (intimate and otherwise) which have arisen in their relationship.  By turns funny and distressing, this is a brutally personal film that blurs the frontier separating fiction from autobiography.

Luc Moullet got a jump on cinematic critiques of neoliberalism with this seminal expos? of globalized, industrial farming at the moment it was taking shape. Moullet begins with a simple (if unorthodox) meal of a banana, tuna fish and a plain omelet then traces the path that each ingredient took to arrive at his plate. From a grocery store in Paris to fields in Ecuador and ports along the Ivory Coast, Moullet talks with corporate managers, government functionaries, marketing gurus and manual laborers all along the line to understand the human and environmental costs of this emergent system and its colonialist roots. As those costs have grown ever more pernicious, Moullet's prescient, in-depth analysis seems ever more vital. 

Actually a comedy of unemployment, which is defined as possibly the worst, or maybe the best, thing that ever happened to this film's group of protagonists: a middle-aged loan officer, his successful wife, a champion of professional joblessness (and mountain-climbing enthusiast), and the employment agency professional who falls passionately in love with him.  This film's honest work involves potatoes, ditch-diggers, a wheelbarrow, doomed love, jam in bed, and gunfire involving dueling employment agencies. 

A loving, slapstick sendup of the French passion for cycling that doubles as an ode to 19th century French symbolist poet Alfred Jarry, Luc Moullet?s Parpaillon (Up and Down) may be the most French thing ever. A mountain road rally up the Parpaillon pass in the French Alps is the simple line on which Moullet hangs a series of gags broad and obscure (depending how versed you are, for example, in the inner tube vs. clincher debate) that have the cumulative effect of slow-release laughing gas. 

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