Bertrand Tavernier has always been passionate about history. Speaking of his childhood, he confided to Jean-Luc Douin: “What I liked most were the historical novels . Through Balzac, Hugo, zola, Dumas, I wanted to explore history”. Bertrand Tavernier also likes to quote this phrase by Samuel Fuller: “You have to make films when you’re angry about something”. How could he not take an interest in war? It permeates – even when not directly the subject – a number of his films. With Tavernier, war is never seen from the viewpoint of heroes. Or else they are heroes whose heroism is not evident, like those who recount their Algerian war in The War Without a Name, or the character of Jean Devaivre played by Jacques Gamblin in Safe Conduct. These are also ambiguous heroes, such as the “warrior” Conan (Philippe Torreton) and his cohort, criminals released from prison to go to war and who fight “like Sioux”.
Despite his admiration for Hugo and Zola, Tavernier’s way of approaching war is closer to that of Stendhal. The battles depicted in Conan barely convey what is happening. This is because Tavernier’s vision is from within; never an overbearing view. And it is from within that he describes to us this troubled and disillusioned officer played by Philippe Noiret in Life and Nothing But, confronted two years after the end of the war by two women seeking, among the 350,000 missing, the untraceable remains of their husband and fiancé. Life and Nothing But, a pacifist film whose subject is the resurrection of the living-dead. While drawn to the period of World War I, it was initially the Middle Ages that fascinated him, through, for example,the chansons de geste that he read in his youth. In Beatrice, he depicts the twilight of chivalry, and having read Braudel, Duby and Le Goff,he establishes a dramatic rapport between the setting and his characters. The filmmakers that inspire him: Akira Kurosawa and Michael Powel, the English filmmaker whose reinstatement he greatly contributed to and whose energy, fantasy and portraits of women he so admires...
In his war films, like all great filmmakers, Tavernier tells us as much about the present as the past, since his curiosity and his anger against stupidity and injustice remain constant.
He passed away in 2021.
