PROGRAM NOTES

“Producing is the only way to make films.” — Paul Vecchiali

“Vecchiali made films that sometimes slipped by unnoticed and ensured that French cinema remained truly an auteur cinema despite all the pressures it was under. He is a pioneer, and one cannot fail to mention him when talking about French cinema.” — Éric Rohmer

The filmmaker and producer Paul Vecchiali started Diagonale with Cécile Clairval in 1976. As he later put it, “I wanted to be a producer, to make my own films and those of directors with whom I felt I could build up a real language over the long term.”

The company had two arms, one that produced films and one that provided catering for corporate events; the money from the latter helped fund the former. This is an example of the kind of economic ingenuity Vecchiali put into practice to enable films to be made — taking on industrial commissions, using the same crew on multiple productions simultaneously, working as an editor himself for free.

Operating independently of the larger French film industry, Diagonale produced some of the most idiosyncratic films of the late twentieth century. From Vecchiali’s own intoxicating collisions of the New Wave and the popular French cinema of the thirties, to Jean-Claude Biette’s enigmatic fugues on art and life, to Jean-Claude Guiguet’s claustrophobic chamber drama, to Marie-Claude Treilhou’s nocturnal Wunderkammern, Diagonale productions represented a side of Paris that had been hidden from cinema: the suburbs, gay clubs, cruising spots, the homes of the middle-aged and the unemployed. These films eschewed the naturalism ascendant in the French cinema of the seventies for a return to the pleasures of performance, décor and music, all tinged with the harshness of a square look at life behind closed doors in urban France.

This programme of five of Diagonale’s finest productions marks the release of issue 2 of the international film quarterly Narrow Margin, which is dedicated to the work produced by the company and includes over 100,000 words of new or newly-translated writing. The films will be screened from recent restorations, four of which have never been shown theatrically in the UK.

Program notes by Sam Warren Miell