Marcel Hanoun is one of the underappreciated directors of World Cinema stature. Since his death in 2012, his body of work remains generally unknown. His unique and varied cinematic career lives at the margins of modernist film, of the French New Wave, and even of experimental cinema. Hanoun merits mention alongside such auteurs as Robert Bresson, Philippe Garrel, and Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet. Hanoun made films with an uncompromising independence, formal rigor, and unceasing creativity, and his work is long overdue for recognition. Therefore, GME now offers an opportunity for academic re-evaluation of this artist by way of three of the films in his cinematic canon: two new digital publications, UNE SIMPLE HISTOIRE (1959) and OCTOBRE À MADRID (1964), in addition to LES SAISONS (1968-1972), which we released previously.

Hanoun was born into a Jewish-Algerian family in Tunis in 1929, when Tunisia was still a French protectorate. Escaping the worst of World War II, he came to Paris to stay after the Liberation, and worked there as a journalist and a photographer. (His father had been an avid amateur camera buff, influencing his son’s vocation). Hanoun directed his first film for television in 1956, about refugees from that year’s Soviet-suppressed Hungarian Uprising. This was also the year of Bresson’s A MAN ESCAPED (1956), a film which was a revelation to the young Hanoun. Hanoun theorized a cinema in which the word and image were separated and given equal value. In this, Hanoun was working along the same lines of thought as the radical experimental filmmaker Isidore Isou, whose TRAITÉ DE BAVE ET D'ETERNITÉ proceeded along a similar path, but with a much more overtly confrontational approach. Hanoun employs a more quiet, contemplative style, using a static camera and images that force the viewer to concentrate on the most quotidian aspects of existence and to accentuate the dichotomy between sound and image which is implicit in all of cinema.

Marcel Hanoun’s first feature film, UNE SIMPLE HISTOIRE, was shot in 16mm on a low budget; it is the minimalist tale of a mother and her daughter looking for lodging and work in Paris. The film begins with the end of the story: a woman is taken in by a benevolent elderly woman; she’s embarrassed and considers leaving, but instead travels back within her memories of the preceding days. In flashback we see what has happened to her since her arrival in Paris with her small daughter. The film ends before her reverie is complete, and the spectator is left with the open-ended question of what will happen when she emerges from her memory.

Throughout the film, in first-person voiceover, the mother narrates her experiences seeking accommodations, looking for work, and feeding her daughter. As she recounts her experiences in the past tense, in temporal terms this contradicts the present-tense dialogue interaction with her various interlocutors that she meets throughout Paris. Similarly, her voiceover describing the events corresponds in elliptical fashion to the imagery of her wandering the Parisian streets with her daughter. In Hanoun’s hands, this deceptively simple drama becomes a cubist portrait of a woman’s daily struggle to avoid poverty and maintain her dignity in the Paris of the 1950’s – the film shuttling between past, present, and an unknown future; between documentary-like images of Paris and a fictional construct; and between reality and memory. According to film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, writing in 1970 upon the film’s belated showing at the New York Film Festival, “UNE SIMPLE HISTOIRE creates a new kind of filmic reality, a fugue-like narrative form which infuses a simple story with unnatural beauty and power. There is little chance of a masterpiece like UNE SIMPLE HISTOIRE receiving the kind of attention it deserves.”

UNE SIMPLE HISTOIRE (1959) showed at the Cannes Film Festival alongside Truffaut’s THE 400 BLOWS (1959) and Alain Resnais’s HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR (1959). Hanoun’s film won the Grand Prix Eurovision at the festival. Jean-Luc Godard was passionate about the film; he praised it as a synthesis of Robert Bresson’s ascetic technique and Italian neorealism’s social content. Historically, Hanoun represents a bridge between the filmmakers of the French New Wave and the generation that followed (Phillippe Garrel, Jean Eustache, and Maurice Pialet.

OCTOBRE À MADRID (1964) a film about filmmaking, blurs the boundaries between work and life. It is considered as one of the first “essay films” of French cinema. In the first part of the 1960’s, Marcel Hanoun lived for a while in Spain, in a kind of self-imposed exile from his filmmaking world in Paris. Even though Hanoun was disappointed by how difficult it was to complete his projects in France, this destination seemed paradoxical. Spain, walled in by Franco’s regime since the Civil War, offered nothing more in appearance than sun-drenched boredom, an almost motionless daily life interspersed with a few local rituals whose picturesque charm Hanoun captured in short, often commissioned documentaries, including a Holy Week procession and a bullfight.

In OCTOBRE À MADRID, Hanoun tackles for the first time the theme of a film about filmmaking, which focuses on location scouting and a talent search for his protagonist named Carmen. In one sense, then, OCTOBRE À MADRID is a documentary: an amalgam of his impressions of Spain, made up of his previous short documentaries and of encounters with his artist friends. On another level, the film is a fiction, as the filmmakers recalls a script that he abandoned four years earlier that should have started and ended on a close-up of an actress’ face as she puts on makeup. Yet as a third layer, OCTOBRE À MADRID is a film diary, in which Hanoun tells in voice-over how the filmmaking project is progressing, with all its stops, starts, and detours. In this sense, OCTOBRE À MADRID is reminiscent of Jonas Mekas’s films LOST, LOST, LOST and WALDEN. All these variations and simulations of the film echo one another, emerge from one another; the same film set, empty of any human presence, or the same view of fleeting passersby in Madrid can appear at different levels, sometimes simultaneously, resurfacing sometimes in the past conditional or in the future tense. All these dimensions of reality and fiction merge so profoundly that the filmmaker can affirm that throughout all his difficulties, “the film did come to exist”, nourished by these materials, fragments of reality and attempts at fiction.

THE SEASONS (LES SAISONS) is a quadriptych, which includes L’ÉTÉ (1968), L’HIVER (1969), LE PRINTEMPS (1970), and L’AUTOMNE (1971). This film thematically complements Henri Storck’s SYMPHONIE PAYSANNE (1942-1944), another movie about the four seasons. THE SEASONS furthers Hanoun’s signature style in terms of images reflecting back upon themselves (using frames of doors, windows, and mirrors), flash frames and a blank screen, shifts from b&w to color and back again, overdubs on the sound track, repetition and temporal displacements. The plot of two of the films concerns the process of filmmaking, returning to Hanoun’s earlier conceit in OCTOBRE À MADRID. The elaborate DVD boxed set of LES SAISONS also includes a 100-page booklet about each of the films and includes an interview with the filmmaker. This DVD edition of the film recently won the prestigious Il Cinema Ritrovato DVD award in 2017 for Best Rediscovery of a Forgotten Film.

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